Girls Hiking

Saturday, we stepped away from real life for just a bit to take our first hike of the season. Lilly isn’t quite as good as KB’s labs at posing for photos upon chosen peaks or rock outcroppings, but she tries.

My verbal cues and hand gestures didn’t help. I was going for regal girl atop mountain, but Lilly’s body language tells another story.

After hiking more than an hour to this summit, during which time we only saw one runner, we headed back the way we came.

Clearly, if we want to hike on weekends, we’ll need to get up earlier to avoid both the heat and other park visitors. It wasn’t terrible, though.

We saw the runner again. We saw one guy with two dogs. We saw one family strung out upon the trail, with several young, blonde girls poking along.

We managed to get a good 15-20 feet off the trail when Lilly spotted the two dogs pulling their dad up the trail. She sat. She ate. She didn’t give them a second thought.

The family turned out to be a bit harder since we came up on them around a bend and had less time to make our escape. The first spot I picked had too much cactus, so we ask for a couple seconds to cross back over and get up on a more meadow-like flat spot.

Trail-side conversations crack me up. After asking if they could pet Lilly, which I declined, one of the little girls asked, “What are you doing with her mouth?”

I guess it looked weird to her that I kept handing Lilly pieces of food as they passed. So, I explained.

Then, the last girl in the family chain, who toddled along with a pacifier in her mouth. Smiled, and smiled, and smiled at us as she poked along. Then, just as she passed us, she pointed a tiny pink finger at us and said (around the pacifer), “CUTE!”

It made me laugh.

Lilly’s terrific trail manners continued from last summer, despite the hiatus. She observed my OFF TRAIL cues, when we needed to yield the singletrack to others. She didn’t seem nervous, even when we saw the dogs. I suspect that the wide-open spaces at the beginning of this loop help a lot.

A single doe and a skittering chipmunk posed her only temptations, along the way, and each earned just one lunge and return. It’s sort of Lilly’s version of faking the chase … like, “HA! Made you flinch.”

She feigns predator, then returns to me smiling. A leash ensures everyone’s safety in such situations.